Practical Simulations for Machine Learning

Chapter 4. Creating a More Advanced Simulation

So far, you’ve been introduced to the basics of simulation and the basics of synthesis. It’s time to dive in a bit further and do some more simulation. Back in Chapter 2, we built a simple simulation environment that showed you how easy it is to assemble a scene in Unity and use it to train an agent.

In this chapter, we’re going to build on the things you’ve already learned and create a slightly more advanced simulation using the same fundamental principles. The simulation environment we’re going to build is shown in Figure 4-1.

Figure 4-1. The simulation we’ll be building

This simulation will consist of a cube, which will again serve as our agent. The agent’s goal will be to push a block into a goal area as quickly as possible.

By the end of this chapter, you’ll have continued to solidify your Unity skills for assembling simulation environments, and have a better handle on the components and features of the ML-Agents Toolkit.

Setting Up the Block Pusher

For a full rundown and discussion of the tools you’ll need for simulation and machine learning, refer back to Chapter 1. This section will give you a quick summary of the bits and pieces you’ll need to accomplish this particular activity.

Specifically, here we will do the following:

1. Create a new Unity project and set it up for use with ML-Agents.

2. Create the environment for our ...